


The revolution’s coming (It’s a minute away)

by OurLadyofPerpetualWallflowers



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Billy has anger issues, M/M, Too Many Metaphors, another one, but there's more sex?, harringrove challenge, kind of, steve curses less, steve's a little anxious, still no dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:24:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OurLadyofPerpetualWallflowers/pseuds/OurLadyofPerpetualWallflowers
Summary: The summer of 1985 stretches out like a tripwire between two trees. It feels like any moment Steve can take a wrong turn and stumble, fall into a trap, blow it all away.The wire is tied at one end to all the things Steve wanted before. Before he graduated high school without a plan. Before he became the unofficial older brother of half the town’s preteens. Before he knew what crept in the shadows. Before he lost Nancy. Before he had Nancy.The other end spools off into the future, into the unknown, like an old map he saw in geography once, when no one knew what lay in certain parts of the world so they just left it blank.Here there be dragons.Steve is standing in the forest, too afraid to move because there’s danger all around and he doesn’t know what will set it off.Somewhere along the way, Billy Hargrove winds up standing next to him.





	The revolution’s coming (It’s a minute away)

**Author's Note:**

> Another one for @rarsablack’s Harringrove challenge. Apparently my contribution to this fandom is gonna be weird fics with no dialogue and too many metaphors. 
> 
> My lyric:
> 
> You know we are made up of love and hate  
> But both of them are balanced on a razor blade
> 
> -'What Do I Know?' by Ed Sheeran

The summer of 1985 stretches out like a tripwire between two trees. It feels like any moment Steve can take a wrong turn and stumble, fall into a trap, blow it all away.

The wire is tied at one end to all the things Steve wanted before. Before he graduated high school without a plan. Before he became the unofficial older brother of half the town’s preteens. Before he knew what crept in the shadows. Before he lost Nancy. Before he had Nancy.

The other end spools off into the future, into the unknown, like an old map he saw in geography once, when no one knew what lay in certain parts of the world so they just left it blank.

Here there be dragons.

Steve is standing in the forest, too afraid to move because there’s danger all around and he doesn’t know what will set it off.

Somewhere along the way, Billy Hargrove winds up standing next to him.

Actually, that’s not quite right.

Billy doesn’t stand in the face of danger. He rushes into it. Spits in its face and flips it off. If Steve can’t move, then Billy can’t stay still, stomping through the trees and to hell with the consequences, fuck anybody caught in the blast.

If the future is a tripwire, then Billy is a landmine.

They circle each other for months. Words and fists exchanged on multiple occasions. Billy keys his car. Steve fills his locker with dirt. Billy knocks him out in a brawl at a house party. When Steve comes to five minutes later, Jonathan and Nancy hovering over him in fear, he immediately finds Billy and breaks a chair across his back. Soon enough, everyone learns to leave them alone. This is more than teenage posturing, more than one upmanship. It’s a physical chess match and while only Billy and Steve seem to know the score, you’d have to be blind not to see you should stay off the fucking board.

They scuffle in the alley behind the movie theater, while the kids are inside watching a double feature. Billy knocks the wind out of him. Steve breaks his nose. And then they’re on each other, mouths and hands and hips, rutting like animals in the evening light. They push each other to completion, each one determined to win, each one unable to let go first. It’s over faster than Steve thought it would be. But then it’s been building up for months, so actually it’s the longest Steve’s ever lasted.

They collapse against each other after, holding each other up on weak knees. Billy’s face is buried in Steve’s shoulder, his teeth still locked around a mouthful of his shirt. Steve’s panting like he ran laps for an hour, one hand is still buried in the space between their bodies.

Billy moves his head. His lips brush Steve’s jaw right where a bruise is blooming.

They untangle themselves slowly, moving stiffly and sore from the fight and the sex, righting clothes and catching each other’s breath in tentative kisses, touching sticky fingers to marks from fists.

They don’t talk about it.

They do it twice more before the end of the movie.

Summer lingers on. Steve doesn’t know what this is, this thing between them. They still fight. But now, they’re just as likely to wind up covered in spit and cum as dirt and blood. It’s a crapshoot on any given day. A penny in the air. A tripwire.

They talk about it once. Sort of. Billy asks him if he’s going to college in the fall. Steve shrugs. Billy drops it. Two days later Steve asks him when his birthday is. Billy says July. Steve lets it go. They’re circling again, pushing each each, neither wanting to be the first to grab on.

There’s a stain on Steve’s shirt from that first time, near the collar where Billy had hidden his moans. A reddish brown heart shape from his split lip. Not the cute little shape they sell on candy and cards, but the shape of the real thing, a muscle clenched like a fist, with chambers like a gun.

Steve wears it to bed. He can’t wear it anywhere else.

They fight in the parking lot of the school one clear July morning. It’s hot. Too hot, really, to do much of anything but at the same time it’s too hot to do nothing. They can’t stay still. Steve can see that now. The only way to find out what the future holds is to walk towards it, slow and steady, and hope you don’t hit a wire. So they fight. And after, when they’re laying on the grass, breathing and bleeding, Steve finds Billy’s hand in the dirt. And he grabs on.

Billy fights him on it, because he’s Billy. He spits in his face. He flips him off. He hurls curses and fists and anything he can throw in Steve’s general direction. He yells about his father, about a house full of tripwires, about an explosion so big it threw them halfway across the country. He laughs at the idea that he’d go through it all again for Steve. For a small town former king with a high school diploma and a head full of nightmares. Billy laughs until he cries and then he leaves, blood on his hands, tears on his face.

They don’t do anything for a week.

Steve buries a stained shirt in the back of his closet.

Billy walks through town like a shadow.

It hurts.

It’s the most painful thing he’s ever felt. Worse than Nancy, worse then any fight, worse than the knowledge that there’s a whole realm of creatures bigger, stronger, hungrier than him. It turns his whole body into a wound, aching with his breaths, throbbing with his pulse. Steve feels like he’s bleeding out, like he’s dying. Forget explosions. Billy’s poisoned him and is walking around with the cure in the curve of his cheek and the blue of his eyes, the warmth of his hands and the jut of his hips.

It hurts until Steve remembers that Billy can’t stand in the face of danger. That he has to rage against the forest so it knows he’s not afraid of it. It’s odd to realize he’s Billy’s tripwire. It’s odd to think of himself as dangerous.

So he takes a step. Slips a note under a windshield wiper. Crosses his fingers and lies awake that night, fingers twisting in the hem of a shirt he can’t wear anywhere else.

They wind up in the alley behind the movie theater again. No kids this time. No excuses. They put their backs to the wall and they look at the ground. At their feet, standing still. At their hands, clasped between their bodies. They breathe together. And something shifts. The penny drops.

California isn’t much better. Billy makes that clear. It’s not any different from Hawkins really, the numbers are just tilted a little bit more in their favor, the chessboard a little bit bigger.

People will still try and break them. Still call them disgusting, refuse to hire them, beat them and curse them and make them fight for every scrap of anything they can get their hands on. And they’re young. Still kids despite being eighteen. They fight as often as they don’t. They’ve never made love in an actual bed. They have maybe two hundred dollars and a couple of cars to their names. Billy lays out all the ways this could go horribly wrong. Points out all the traps in their way, the odds stacked against them, the danger they’ll face. Except the one right in front of them. The one where they can’t even name this thing between them.

Everyone around them calls it hate. Billy and Steve are too afraid to call it love. It’s probably both. Two kings circling around checkmate, locked in place because it only takes one wrong move to lose the whole game.

Steve knows. Steve doesn’t care. Steve has a bat full of nails and the hand of a boy like a landmine. His heart has chambers like a gun. He’s given Billy the trigger. And if he’s going to die on a tripwire in the woods, he thinks he wants to see the ocean before he goes.

They’ve been fighting each other since they met. They can fight the rest of the world while they’re at it.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Ed Sheeran for turning his song into a grimly determined gay rights thing, I'm pretty sure that's not what he intended. Find me on tumblr at [dobetterbillyhargrove](dobetterbillyhargrove.tumblr.com)


End file.
